Gunshine.Net: Fill Some Thugs with Lead…with Friends…in Real Time

If you’ve been looking for a social massively multiplayer experience on Facebook, Gunshine.net is here to deliver. Developed by game industry veterans at Finland-based Supercell, Gunshine.net is a little bit Shadowrun and a little bit World of Warcraft. While much simpler than traditional MMOs, Gunshine.net delivers a rather sophisticated experience inside your browser.

Gunshine.net is set in a near future dystopia and features guns, megacorps and an underground resistance group. It all starts at the gates to Dawnbreak City, an urban island controlled by the research corporation Labycorp. The promise of Dawnbreak city is a better future through science. The reality is an orange jumpsuit and forced labor.

The first moments of the game walk you through the quick unraveling of Labycorp’s Orwellian double speak. This involves shooting some guards and blowing up a wall or two as the resistance makes you their newest recruit. So, the “gun” in “Gunshine” doesn’t waste time showing up.

The world of Gunshine.net is a violent one. It’s not gory or anything and it’s much more mild than what you find in traditional games, but there’s definitely more killing than you find on your typical Facebook farm. The gritty gameplay will be welcome to players looking for a game with an edge, but take this as a gentle heads up if you prefer pacifist solutions to problems.

Gunshine.net plays a lot like massively multiplayer games in the World of Warcraft genre. Characters in the world dole out quests, which usually involve eliminating a number of a certain type of enemy, collecting stuff or running something from one place to another. You fight to gain experience and money so you can raise levels and buy better equipment so you can go out and fight harder stuff to start the whole process over. This is un-affectionately called the “grind,” but the grind can be a lot of fun sometimes. When it’s fun, it’s usually called a “play loop,” and Gunshine the play loops work well.

Early quests involve turf wars between the resistance and local gangs. Not everyone rebelling against Labycorp is a human rights freedom fighter. Defectors have split into ten different factions and you’ll eventually get to choose which ones to joing. For starters though, you spend time knocking out local thugs’ drug operations.

The best feature Gunshine.net brings to the table is synchronous gameplay with friends. In traditional MMOs we take it for granted that we can play online games in real time with our friends, but on Facebook, this real-time interaction has been rare. Gunshine.net lets you team up with up to three other friends at once. The game also lets you choose from three different professions (Hunter, Doctor and Bodyguard) so each friend has a special role.

When it comes to times when your friends are offline, Gunshine.net takes a page from Dragon Age Legends. While in the game, you can hire henchmen to tag along on your missions. Some of these are offered by the game, but you can also recruit friends’ characters for the fray. Recruiting a friend is usually better as her character will be more experienced and better equipped than the options the system offers. Friends can only be recruited for a certain time period per transaction, so if you want to play tougher areas more often, you’ll need more cash.

Gunshine.net offers a lot of diversity in customization. Weapons range from handguns, to long-range rifles, to close-range crowbars. There’s a lot of variety and each weapon has its own advantages and disadvantages. Clothing and armor show up on your character and they offer both statistic and aesthetic benefits. Like other social games, rare and unique options can be bought with real world cash.

At the point of this writing, I played up to level 5. The game moves rather quickly with most missions taking five minutes or less. Discussion on the forums shows some players are already reaching level 31, which seems to garner a prestige title within one’s profession. Gunshine.net is only at version 0.3.5 so far and adding new features very frequently. For this early stage of development, the game looks really good and plays very well. If you’re looking for a free-to-play MMO inside of Facebook that offers bite-size questing, check this one out. Gunshine.net offers an environment and play experience unlike anything else on Facebook right now.